Political pundits will fill their annual New Year's columns and broadcasts with grandiose pronouncements about the importance of the choices that voters will make during the Presidential election process in the USA in 2012. When JEB Bush gets the Republican Party nomination in TampaBeach next summer, the upper echelon of the political punditry world will then be invited into the boss' office and be given a choice of their next assignment. They can either be a part of the national dialogue that sheepishly concedes "Wow! Nobody saw that coming!" and write columns asserting that American voters have absolved the Bush family of any misdeeds, and will (like the return of the prodigal son) welcome them back to the White House, or they can clean out their desks and prepare themselves emotionally to do the necessary gonzo-journalism style research for a book titled "Living among the homeless of America."

What reporter's family wouldn't become very emotional about the chance for the head of the house hold's opportunity to become a word-slinger's version of Dorothea Lang or Walker Evans who did epic pioneering photojournalism during the Great Depression?

Most will choose the former rather than the latter. (Didn't Waylon Jennings sing a song with a line about climbing a ladder that leads to a hole in the ground?)

Any cynic will be quick to point out that there are always exceptions to the rule. Was George Orwell married when he did the "been there done that" aspect of the fact gathering process for his book "Down and Out in London and Paris"? Was Kerouac married when he went on the road with Neal Cassidy?

For any obscure blogger who just happened to start making predictions in 2010 about JEB Bush being the President-elect at Christmas time in 2012, the choices to be faced in 2013 will be different.

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No! It won't be which lucrative offer from the mainstream media to accept. Such an oracle will have to decide how to handle a tsunami of indifference. Obviously a year of "I-tried-to-warn-you" columns would be a major audience turn-off. Feigning surprise at something that the World's Laziest Journalist has been predicting for two year would be more of a stretch than his lamentable acting ability could cover.

Obviously if the JEB prediction is spot-on, we'll have earned the right to indulge in fun feature assignments; if we are wrong, a few dozen regular readers will be annoyed with our misplaced confidence in our predicting abilities. Either way there won't be much of an effect on the stock market or the reader's retirement funds.

So what sort of columns should a cynical pundit write during the last year on the Mayan Calendar?

The columnist's quandary was brought into sharp focus during the recent holiday weekend because of several serendipity walkabouts in San Francisco. We discovered some marvelous feature material and also stumbled upon some noteworthy facets of the contemporary political maze.

On Friday, December 23, 2011, we chanced upon the TenderloinNational Park. On Christmas we took photos of a spaceport in San Francisco. A visit to the art installation titled "Defenestration" would produce some eye-catching images.

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Obviously, we could weave some political commentary to accompany the photos of those noticeable urban visuals but at this point it seems redundant to dabble in cliches about the tumultuous scramble to become the Republican Party's Presidential Nominee.

We could race around the country and try to document the effects of the economic slowdown on the average citizen because it seems that the cash strapped Government isn't going to subsidize a new version of the work done in the Thirties by Dorthea Lang or Walker Evans.

We could just do fact checking on feature topics and know that the amusement and entertainment provided by the process will be our only reward.

BP graduated from college in the mid sixties (at the bottom of the class?) He told his draft board that Vietnam could be won without his participation. He is still appologizing for that mistake. He received his fist photo lesson from a future (more...)